Author Spotlight: Bill Watterson

As you might be able to tell from my last post, I really like cats since I have one of my own. The only thing that kept me from naming her “Hobbes” though, was the fact that she is a girl. Why Hobbes? Well, if you have ever read any of the comics from Calvin & Hobbes, you would know that Hobbes is Calvin’s stuffed tiger and best friend. Calvin is a misbehaving and hyperactive six-year-old boy with a wild imagination. The whole entire comic series is about their daily adventures together, terrorizing their baby sitter, building obscene snowmen during the winter, fighting with his classmate Suzie (who has cooties since she’s a girl), and everything in between. The comics also take us along with Calvin and Hobbes in their amazing imagination of time traveling, getting abducted by aliens, and saving the world with his secret second identity as superhero “Stupendous Man.” The brilliant man behind these comics is Bill Watterson. Now that you know a bit about his comics, here’s a few facts about the author himself…

For four years, Watterson was designing grocery advertisements before he started the creation of Calvin & Hobbes.

Charles Schulz, the creator of the comic series Peanuts, was one of Bill Watterson’s inspirations as a comic artist.

Comics in the newspapers used to be drawn in boring rectangular boxes. Watterson was the first one to oppose this, and managed to convince the newspapers to let him draw his comics the way he wanted. In a lot of his comic strips, the panels overlap, and sometimes the action even progresses diagonally across the strip!

The stuffed tiger Hobbes is based off of the famous English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He’s a very smart tiger considering he has stuffing for brains!

Here’s a personal fact about me: I spent the first paycheck I ever got on the Complete Calvin and Hobbes Collection. Calvin & Hobbes is my favorite comic series of all time. I can read and reread them over and over again, and each time is still as funny as the first! If you haven’t yet, I would definitely recommend that you check it out this summer. Maybe you can get some ideas from Calvin on how to make life more interesting.